First and foremost, I owe the Chinese New Year an apology. Turns out, fireworks are both horribly addictive and wonderful to scare bad spirits away, and most of the excessive eating and seasonal dishes have special meanings. I actually decided to break with my vegetarian self for the evening and try at least a little bit of every food that had some meaning. I tried some of the home-made sausage that is hnug outside so that the community can feel the holiday approaching, new years fish to bring me wealth, a chicken wing that young women eat so that they can fly away to beautiful places, a dumpling with a coin inside which thankfully didn't break my teeth, and "long life noodles" first thing on the morning of the new year. I'm forgetting a lot here as dinner was before an evening of firework warfare... In my last post I mentioned fireworks in on three sides... I don't think there was a square meter free of explosives between dusk and midnight on New Years Eve. Also, on the 18th, the Xupings invited Randy, Weihe and I to come watch them pay homage to their ancestors at a nearby mountain temple, where Spring festival is the busiest time of the year. So, as much as television and development has interferred with tradition recently, in the countryside at least, much remains intact.
After the holiday in Dayi with Randy and the Xupings, I took off on a weeklong adventure through Guizhou and Guangxi, two provinces that are southeast of Sichuan. For the last few days my friend Nick and I have been hiking around in the pine forested mountains and Miao minority villages Eastern Guizhou. A few days ago we spent half a day snaking down a paddied mountain to a cluster of houses for lunch then walked along the river back to Xijiang, where we were staying with the family of a woman we met on the bus. The Miao are also famous for their embroidery, which is incredibly colorful and elaborate...I asked a woman in town to teach me, and should have a dragon ready to go by the time I get home. We're expecting it to be "cute" a.k.a. horribly botched, so I bought a few more authentic examples to share.
Yesterday we went to a bull fight (which directly translates from chinese as "cow fight") in another small community downstream and spent the day hanging over a bridge with a bunch of kids watching what we think are actually water buffalo ram eachother in a crowd of crouching men.
Now I'm in Sanjiang headed to Guilin tomorrow morning to meet my friend from GreenSOS who is from the area. We had about a dozen near death experiences on the bus careening alongside bottomless cliffs and sharing seats with ducks, chickens, and vomiting children on the way over, and there is absolutely no going back for me. Thank god for trains, planes, and the "supernaturally lovely karst topography" that awaits!
Monday, February 26, 2007
Friday, February 16, 2007
Happiness Upside-Down.
The Chinese New Year is tomorrow, February 18th, and the city is decorated with red lanterns, flowers, ornaments, bustling with traffic, packages, people, and exploding at every corner with excitement, or more literally, with sparklers, and fireworks. Traditionally each spring festival, everyone goes back to their hometown to spend the weeklong holiday with their families, and since the end of January when school got out, people traveling en masse across the country. The Wang’s daughter has come home from Singapore, where she has been working for eight years, and everyday, relatives, classmates, and neighbors have been stopping by for tea or meeting us for banquet lunches all over town.
That said, Spring Festival is also about food. A few months ago, people started preparing thick red sausages to celebrate prosperity on the New Year, and strings hang at every market, and in every house, frequently rubbing up against the days drying clothes on the clothesline. This afternoon I noticed a coat rack outside someone’s door where two whole chickens were hanging upside down, tanning with string of sausage, and a dog patiently waiting for disaster. Does this seem absurd to anyone else? There’s meat everywhere.
In my house we’ve also been eating a lot of different rice combinations wrapped with cornhusks and string. Some of them are stuffed with meat, but others are sweet with brown sugar and red bean paste or corn. There are also a variety of different small cakes and treats that I think are for the New Year, and a “New Years Fish” that is actually a bowl of about a dozen whole fried fish soaking in a spicy soup that you have to poke around for with your chop sticks. A spring festival banquet isn’t complete until everyone was stuffed out of their minds before eight more dishes arrived on the table for mandatory sampling. Both yesterday at lunch, and dinner this evening, the table was overflowing with food and plates were stacked on top of each other in heaping pyramids of meats, soups, vegetables, rolls, with the constant clink of cheering glasses above.
But to be honest, amidst all of this excessive festivity, I feel like we’ve all gone a little insane. So much of what historically must have been meaningful Chinese heritage, I feel, has been lost in the insatiable consumerism that is storming over this nation. Millions of cheap plastic disposable lanterns clutter every commercial overhang and window clashing with yesterday’s advertisements, and box upon box of processed individually wrapped cakes replace homemade goodies. Grandparents are abandoned in their rural villages, and there just aren’t enough trains to get the migrant workers back home. The rising middle class shares new opportunities for travel, leisure, and living room TV extravaganzas while the poor are left to their own devices when only children can’t get stuck somewhere else. Also, with firework explosions on three sides, post-trauma car alarms, smoking card board launch pads, and the cops belatedly buzzing the crowd with lights ablaze, it’s not hard to confuse these drunken, lantern littered streets with some kind of violent combat zone.
Maybe it’s just my foreign disconnected self refusing to be swept away in the celebration and watching wide-eyed as two young boys duel with giant roman candles, and the waitress clears away yet another untouched bird or fish. Or maybe with China’s new eye towards the American dream, it feels like my country’s biggest flaws are perverting traditions and cultures everywhere. It’s one thing when we replace Jesus with Santa and presents, but when our outsourcing and obese consumer culture displaces millions and buries Chinese traditions in so much product that young generations can no longer find the meaning, it’s hard to celebrate.
One of the most popular Spring Festival decorations is the character for happiness written on red paper cut outs and decorated with fish, pigs, and other symbols for prosperity and wealth. In Chinese, the pronunciation of “upside-down” is the same as the pronunciation of “arrive”, and a lot of the decorations for happiness, on my door for example, are upside-down, as a play on words to mean that happiness will arrive, or has arrived. When this was first explained to me, I thought it was clever…now I’m wondering if at some magical threshold number, all of the red glittered arriving happiness doesn’t just become tacky decorations hung upside-down.
The Chinese New Year is tomorrow, February 18th, and the city is decorated with red lanterns, flowers, ornaments, bustling with traffic, packages, people, and exploding at every corner with excitement, or more literally, with sparklers, and fireworks. Traditionally each spring festival, everyone goes back to their hometown to spend the weeklong holiday with their families, and since the end of January when school got out, people traveling en masse across the country. The Wang’s daughter has come home from Singapore, where she has been working for eight years, and everyday, relatives, classmates, and neighbors have been stopping by for tea or meeting us for banquet lunches all over town.
That said, Spring Festival is also about food. A few months ago, people started preparing thick red sausages to celebrate prosperity on the New Year, and strings hang at every market, and in every house, frequently rubbing up against the days drying clothes on the clothesline. This afternoon I noticed a coat rack outside someone’s door where two whole chickens were hanging upside down, tanning with string of sausage, and a dog patiently waiting for disaster. Does this seem absurd to anyone else? There’s meat everywhere.
In my house we’ve also been eating a lot of different rice combinations wrapped with cornhusks and string. Some of them are stuffed with meat, but others are sweet with brown sugar and red bean paste or corn. There are also a variety of different small cakes and treats that I think are for the New Year, and a “New Years Fish” that is actually a bowl of about a dozen whole fried fish soaking in a spicy soup that you have to poke around for with your chop sticks. A spring festival banquet isn’t complete until everyone was stuffed out of their minds before eight more dishes arrived on the table for mandatory sampling. Both yesterday at lunch, and dinner this evening, the table was overflowing with food and plates were stacked on top of each other in heaping pyramids of meats, soups, vegetables, rolls, with the constant clink of cheering glasses above.
But to be honest, amidst all of this excessive festivity, I feel like we’ve all gone a little insane. So much of what historically must have been meaningful Chinese heritage, I feel, has been lost in the insatiable consumerism that is storming over this nation. Millions of cheap plastic disposable lanterns clutter every commercial overhang and window clashing with yesterday’s advertisements, and box upon box of processed individually wrapped cakes replace homemade goodies. Grandparents are abandoned in their rural villages, and there just aren’t enough trains to get the migrant workers back home. The rising middle class shares new opportunities for travel, leisure, and living room TV extravaganzas while the poor are left to their own devices when only children can’t get stuck somewhere else. Also, with firework explosions on three sides, post-trauma car alarms, smoking card board launch pads, and the cops belatedly buzzing the crowd with lights ablaze, it’s not hard to confuse these drunken, lantern littered streets with some kind of violent combat zone.
Maybe it’s just my foreign disconnected self refusing to be swept away in the celebration and watching wide-eyed as two young boys duel with giant roman candles, and the waitress clears away yet another untouched bird or fish. Or maybe with China’s new eye towards the American dream, it feels like my country’s biggest flaws are perverting traditions and cultures everywhere. It’s one thing when we replace Jesus with Santa and presents, but when our outsourcing and obese consumer culture displaces millions and buries Chinese traditions in so much product that young generations can no longer find the meaning, it’s hard to celebrate.
One of the most popular Spring Festival decorations is the character for happiness written on red paper cut outs and decorated with fish, pigs, and other symbols for prosperity and wealth. In Chinese, the pronunciation of “upside-down” is the same as the pronunciation of “arrive”, and a lot of the decorations for happiness, on my door for example, are upside-down, as a play on words to mean that happiness will arrive, or has arrived. When this was first explained to me, I thought it was clever…now I’m wondering if at some magical threshold number, all of the red glittered arriving happiness doesn’t just become tacky decorations hung upside-down.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Step by Ittsy Bitsy Step
I’m writing from my hotel room in Ningxia, where I arrived with ECOLOGIA on Tuesday. We’re here to continue working with Canadian Aluminum (ALCAN) on the community project component of their local Environment, Health, and Safety program. It’s about eight o’clock in the evening, and from my desk, through my closed windows, I can hear the public speaker working through its evening routine from its perch in some poor tree across the street. It rotates through a series of dialogues, which I assume include news, public service announcements, messages from The Party, as well as orchestral space- odyssey interludes, and static chaos, all of which, to me, is incredibly irritating and creepy. Isn’t the land, air, body, and eye polluted enough in this industrial desert town?
Actually, in what I hope to look back on as a low point in my experience with culture shock or cross-cultural understanding, I can’t help but wonder if the speaker persists only to render anyone within earshot intellectually useless in the evening hours when independent or creative thought is most fruitful! Quick, turn on the television to drown the propaganda! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
....................
It’s now 8:45, the speaker is finished (until tomorrow morning), and I can feel the brain fog lifting. It’s amazing how peaceful quiet can be.
....................
Anyways, after our workshop last September, the ALCAN Sustainability Team went to work on three community projects. Right now we’re reflecting on the experience of the first three, and inviting local community members to participate in the next round. On a local level, these projects addressed issues of elderly health, rural school deficiencies, and traffic safety respectively. On a global level however, ALCAN’s endeavor to engage local stakeholders and facilitate community development represents what I hope is a sea change in international corporate culture.
Last week, for example, I was in Sydney for the fifth working group on ISO 26000, which by 2008 will be a new standard for social responsibility. ISO, the International Standards Association, traditionally deals in technical specifications for everything. Essentially, making international criterion to ensure that all the nuts and bolts of the world are compatible; so that a watt is a watt etc. anywhere you are in the world. Regardless of what happened at this working group, (which I’ll be sure to share asap) just the fact that ISO has initiated the process of creating a standard for social responsibility represents a monumental shift in priorities and vision of not only the organization, but the world. Just twenty years ago, corporate social responsibility was a brand new idea. Actually a colleague told me that just three years ago in Chengdu, mention of corporate social responsibility wouldn’t receive cognizant response from anyone. Now, in Chengdu, CSR front page, and sustainability reports are the new black. Internationally, here are so many documents addressing the issue that there is demand for a gold ISO standard to clarify what exactly businesses are supposed to do. Imagine packaging the Global Reporting Initiative, the UN Global Compact, the Declaration of Human Rights, resolutions from the International Labor Organization, the Earth Charter, and more into one easy-to-read and easy-to-do guidance standard for all organizations all over the world. The impact could* be world changing, pointing to proactive companies like ALCAN as role models, and making holistic and responsible business ethics a social norm.
Tomorrow I will help take one more step towards what I envision as a refined 21st century corporate-consumer-capitalist cultural Eden, working with ALCAN staff and local elementary school teachers to design a project about food safety.
*see future post about Sydney ISO working group. As optimistic as I’m being now, at points last week aggressive industry reps, blind experts, inhibiting politics, and squelched opportunity had me crying behind my poker face.
I’m writing from my hotel room in Ningxia, where I arrived with ECOLOGIA on Tuesday. We’re here to continue working with Canadian Aluminum (ALCAN) on the community project component of their local Environment, Health, and Safety program. It’s about eight o’clock in the evening, and from my desk, through my closed windows, I can hear the public speaker working through its evening routine from its perch in some poor tree across the street. It rotates through a series of dialogues, which I assume include news, public service announcements, messages from The Party, as well as orchestral space- odyssey interludes, and static chaos, all of which, to me, is incredibly irritating and creepy. Isn’t the land, air, body, and eye polluted enough in this industrial desert town?
Actually, in what I hope to look back on as a low point in my experience with culture shock or cross-cultural understanding, I can’t help but wonder if the speaker persists only to render anyone within earshot intellectually useless in the evening hours when independent or creative thought is most fruitful! Quick, turn on the television to drown the propaganda! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
....................
It’s now 8:45, the speaker is finished (until tomorrow morning), and I can feel the brain fog lifting. It’s amazing how peaceful quiet can be.
....................
Anyways, after our workshop last September, the ALCAN Sustainability Team went to work on three community projects. Right now we’re reflecting on the experience of the first three, and inviting local community members to participate in the next round. On a local level, these projects addressed issues of elderly health, rural school deficiencies, and traffic safety respectively. On a global level however, ALCAN’s endeavor to engage local stakeholders and facilitate community development represents what I hope is a sea change in international corporate culture.
Last week, for example, I was in Sydney for the fifth working group on ISO 26000, which by 2008 will be a new standard for social responsibility. ISO, the International Standards Association, traditionally deals in technical specifications for everything. Essentially, making international criterion to ensure that all the nuts and bolts of the world are compatible; so that a watt is a watt etc. anywhere you are in the world. Regardless of what happened at this working group, (which I’ll be sure to share asap) just the fact that ISO has initiated the process of creating a standard for social responsibility represents a monumental shift in priorities and vision of not only the organization, but the world. Just twenty years ago, corporate social responsibility was a brand new idea. Actually a colleague told me that just three years ago in Chengdu, mention of corporate social responsibility wouldn’t receive cognizant response from anyone. Now, in Chengdu, CSR front page, and sustainability reports are the new black. Internationally, here are so many documents addressing the issue that there is demand for a gold ISO standard to clarify what exactly businesses are supposed to do. Imagine packaging the Global Reporting Initiative, the UN Global Compact, the Declaration of Human Rights, resolutions from the International Labor Organization, the Earth Charter, and more into one easy-to-read and easy-to-do guidance standard for all organizations all over the world. The impact could* be world changing, pointing to proactive companies like ALCAN as role models, and making holistic and responsible business ethics a social norm.
Tomorrow I will help take one more step towards what I envision as a refined 21st century corporate-consumer-capitalist cultural Eden, working with ALCAN staff and local elementary school teachers to design a project about food safety.
*see future post about Sydney ISO working group. As optimistic as I’m being now, at points last week aggressive industry reps, blind experts, inhibiting politics, and squelched opportunity had me crying behind my poker face.
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